Posts Tagged ‘Ken Livingstone’

This is another interesting little video from RT. It’s only about 1 1/2 minutes long, and appears to be an extract from an interview on RT’s ‘Going Underground’ with Ken Livingstone, hosted by Afshin Rattansi. They’re discussin the UN report by the Rapporteur on extreme poverty in the UK. As Mike has discussed on his blog, the Tories have decided to ignore it because it clearly shows the massive poverty in the UK, which have been caused by the Tories’ Austerity campaign, and states that it is driven by ideology, not economics. In other words, the poor are getting even more miserably poorer and the rich richer, not because it’ll benefit the country in the long run, but because the Tories want it that way.

Rattansi begins by saying to Livingstone that of the media and these things, he was being a bit lenient on them. He states that the UN Rapporteur on extreme poverty has been investigating the UK, and this, in the wake of the press conference, 120,000 excess deaths because of austerity, and says that Livingstone said that they kinda like Roy Jenkins, kind like that kind of David Owen social democracy, and queries that ‘they didn’t really go big on that story in the immediate aftermath of his big press conference?’

Without seeing the rest of the interview, it’s unclear to what Rattansi’s referring to here – the press, or the Tory party – liking the SDP. But Livingstone replies

Well, it’s quite interesting that in the year after Mrs. Thatcher was forced out of office, Panorama, the BBC documentary, produced a programme about her economic legacy. It’s never been shown because it shows that it didn’t really work, things were worse off under Thatcher than they had been before. The same is true with this government, starting with Cameron eight years ago, we have seen the most devastating cuts in public services, young people facing despair, suicide rates going up, this government has done more damage, frankly makes Mrs. Thatcher look humane.

Absolutely, though this doesn’t mean that she wouldn’t have approved. After all, Thatcher wanted the total dismantlement of the welfare state, including the privatization of the NHS.

The clip says that they contacted the Beeb about Livingstone’s claims, but the Corporation didn’t get back to them in time for the programme.

I don’t know whether the Beeb suppressed such a Panorama documentary or not, but it is likely. The Tory party did suppress a Panorama documentary, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’ on extreme right-wing infiltration of the Tory party. She also withdrew Thames Television’s broadcasting license after they screened the documentary, ‘Death on the Rock’, which showed that the SAS could have picked up the IRA terrorist squad in Gibraltar at any time, but instead deliberately gunned them down as a death squad.

The Tories stand for nothing but poverty and misery for the poor, and riches for the wealthy few. And censor the news with the help of a willing and complicit mainstream media to stop the truth getting out.

As Mike pointed out in his description of the kangaroo court, which fraudulently decided he was an anti-Semite, its head, Maggie Cousins, has form in these proceedings. She was the head of the kangaroo court that expelled the committed anti-racism campaigner, Marc Wadsworth, for anti-Semitism despite his work with the Board of Deputies of British Jews formulating legislation to combat the BNP and their genuinely anti-Semitic attacks on Jews in the ’80s and ’90s. And she was head of the kangaroo court that expelled Cyril Chilson, a naturalized Brit from Israel, also for anti-Semitism.

I found Mr. Chilson’s account of his kangaroo court on Labour Briefing for the 23rd April 2018. It’s entitled ‘From the IDF to the NCC’. Chilson explains that he came to this country in 1996 to study ancient history as a postgraduate student at Brasenose College, Oxford. He had previously spent 16 years in the Israeli Defence Force. In his last post there, he had been a foreign press liaison at the IDF spokesman unit. His duties were to whitewash the atrocities he’d seen committed by the Israeli armed forces, and spoonfeed information to foreign journos.

His experiences in the military, and his own strong socialist beliefs led him to join the Peace Now movement and the now defunct Israeli socialist party, MAPAM. He states, however, that it was only in Britain that he finally came to realise the true objectives of the Israeli state, which was the colonization of Palestine.

He became a naturalized British citizen in 2006, and joined the Labour party during Gordon Brown’s brief tenure of No. 10, because he was afraid of the Tories being re-elected. He considered them exactly the same as the Israeli far-right Likud party. And he welcome the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015. Soon after that, that media became swamped with anti-Corbyn propaganda. His experience within the Israeli propaganda machine allowed him to recognize it very clearly as ‘Hasbara’ – Israeli state civilian propaganda, which is coordinated from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. He was particular watchful about the anonymous accounts, which appeared on Twitter spreading false anti-Semitism accusations. These were also made against him and his family. They included an appeal to the Oxford College at which Chilson teaches to have him sacked.

He makes it clear that the charges of anti-Semitism against him are particularly grotesque, as his mother was saved from death in the concentration camps at the very last minute. His father was a member of the Soviet air force, whose own family were also murdered by the Nazis.

But Labour charged him with anti-Semitism was his criticism of Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians in its apartheid system, its occupation and colonization of the West Bank, and other seized territory, like East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and the siege of Gaza.

His accusers particularly smeared him as an anti-Semite because of his description of the way the Israeli state mobilized foreign Jewish communities to present its propaganda. And the charges they made against him, are exactly the same charges they made against Mike. Chilson writes

My accusers were very keen to recast comments I made on Israel’s success in recruiting certain leaders of western Jewish communities and turning them into zealous supporters who ostracise opposing Jewish voices, as “making mendacious allegations about Jews as a collective” and “accusing Jews, supporters of Israel and critics of antisemitism as being more loyal to Israel than to the UK…”. And most ludicrous – accusing me of “ denying Jewish people the language to describe their own oppression. “

Mike was also accused of claiming that Jews and supporters of Israel were more loyal to that country than the UK, and denying Jews the language to describe their own oppression. Which makes you wonder whether the genuine racists in these kangaroo courts are simply robots following a pre-written script, into which they shoehorn the comments of the people they smear in order to make the charges sound even halfway reasonable.

Chilson concludes

With such a charge sheet, it did not come entirely as a surprise that Ms Cousins and her adjutants ran the disciplinary hearing as a kangaroo court from start to finish. I was constantly disrupted and harassed by the chair and the ‘presenter’ Dan Hogan, and my replies to the accusations were largely ignored. When Ms Cousins declared that the charges were ‘proved’ I decided to leave the kangaroo court in disgust. The anticipated expulsion letter arrived four days later. I have been expelled for two years. Presumably I am expected to be cured from my ‘antisemitism’ by then.

Mike also described how his counter-questions were interrupted by Cousins during his kangaroo court, as clearly she was unable to rebut them and feared that if the presenter answered truthfully, her case would collapse.

It is clearly outrageous that someone as well qualified as Mr. Chilson to recognize Israeli propaganda, himself the son of Holocaust survivors, who had served in the Israeli forces, should ever have been smeared as an anti-Semite. And it shows the complete absence of any morality or decency in the Israel lobby. They cannot tolerate any criticism of Israel, and so resort to smears and lies. And I’ve no doubt that Chilson was particularly targeted because he had been an Israeli propagandist, and so could very easily expose what was going on.

And there’s also a very nasty streak of racism in Cousins, the NCC and their kangaroo court. Zionism has always cooperated with anti-Semites and Nazis, and this is true of British Zionists. They have marched with the Islamophobic EDL and the Nazis of Britain First. A couple of Zionist activists also show up at events sporting Kach T-shirts. Kach is a far-right, Israeli terrorist organization. Any gentile organization which behaved like this would rightly be accused in its turn of being Fascist. But the Fascists of the Israel lobby get away with it.

The Israel lobby also singles out Israel-critical Jews for abuse and vilification, reviling them as ‘kapos’, and ‘traitors’, and screaming that they wished their families had died in the Shoah.

They have also shown themselves very keen to silence the commemoration of the holocausts experienced by other ethnic groups, like Blacks. This happened to Jackie Walker. I think Walker was particularly concerned that the decimation of African societies during the Slave Trade, and the horrific conditions inflicted on the slaves, should be memorialized at the Holocaust Remembrance Day. She has an excellent point. Reading accounts of the conditions and laws erected by the White legislatures of the European colonies to keep African slaves in their place, you are struck by the sheer barbarity of their treatment. Apart from manacles and shackles, the punishments inflicted on the enslaved included flogging, mutilation, castration and being dissected alive. Life expectancy on the plantations was three years. They have rightly been described as ‘concentration camps for Blacks’.

But Maggie Cousins and her ilk don’t want this to be commemorated alongside the Holocaust. They deny that there are groups trying to reserve the Holocaust solely for that suffered by the Jews, even when this is being done, as Walker and Mike showed. And their harassment and persecution of Marc Wadsworth also shows they are intolerant of Black anti-racists and their concerns about anti-Black racism within the Labour party. This is also an element in the persecution of Ken Livingstone, as he raised this issue in a chapter on how the party failed Black Brits in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour.

Cousins is a racist, running the Labour party equivalent of Stalin’s show trials, in order to preserve the power of the Israel lobby and prevent any criticism of the racism and ethnic cleansing of the Israeli state.

It is she, who should be put on trial, with Dan Hogan and the NEC, for this. Genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism should say to her what they say to all other Fascists:

One of the things that is very clear from Mike’s kangaroo court hearing is that Mike is no racist. He never was, and never will be. And growing up in the 1980s when the NF was once again seeking power, racism was attacked by a new generation of Black activists and Black politicians took their place as Labour MPs, we became very conscious of this issue and the need to combat it everywhere and every time it arose. One of the subjects Mike tackled in his attack on the false claims of anti-Semitism levelled against other Labour party members, was the racist abuse directed at Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of Momentum. Walker had attended a Holocaust Day training workshop organized by the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion, the British branch of the Israeli Labour party. She had then committed the unpardonable sin of objecting to the workshop’s exclusive focus on the suffering of the Jews to the exclusion of other groups, who have also suffered genocide. Her comments were secretly recorded, she was accused of anti-Semitism, and suspended from the party.

It is a farcical, shameful accusation from hypocrites and moral nullities. Walker is Jewish and a woman of colour. Her father was a Russian Jew, and her mother a Black American civil rights activist. They met during a civil rights march. Both sides of her family thus know only too well the reality of bigotry, racism and violent intolerance. After her comments were leaked, she suffered further racist abuse from those pretending to be the opponents of anti-Semitism. Mike discussed this in one of his posts, and the faceless Stalinists of the party bureaucracy accused him in turn of anti-Semitism. The NEC dismissed Mike’s concerns out of hand, and made a pompous statement that Mike’s very mention of the issue was

grossly offensive to those the Party seeks to represent particularly the Jewish community. Comments like these have had and continue to have a serious impact on the Party’s position as an inclusive organisation, which stands against antisemitism.

and ‘dismissive of anti-Semitism’.

Utter bilge!

Mike and some of the Jewish bloggers have shown the vile tweets directed at people like them on Twitter by Zionists, who very much claim that the focus should only be on the Jewish Holocaust. And the racist abuse suffered by Walker herself was appalling. Among the insults hurled at her was the charge that she couldn’t be Jewish, because she was Black. This is despite the fact that there are African Jews, of which the Falashas are probably the best known. Indeed, the Bible records that one of Moses’ wives came from Cush, which is now part of modern Ethiopia. There have been a number of documentaries and pieces by journalists exposing the violent racism in Israel against Black Africans, including Jews of Ethiopian heritage, who have come to Israel. Furthermore, the transatlantic Zionist right, or at least elements of it, also take the view that only Jewish suffering must be commemorated on Holocaust Memorial Day. Kathy Shaidle, an extreme right-wing Canadian Conservative/ Republican activist made that very clear on her blog, Five Feet of Fury. She took particular ire at Bernie Farber, the head of the main Canadian Jewish organization. Because Farber was a decent man, who felt Jews should sympathise and show solidarity with all other marginalized and persecuted groups. When Darfur in the Sudan was attacked and its people killed and rape by the Islamist Janjaweed militia, Farber organized a ‘Shabbat for Darfur’, a day of fasting and prayer in the Jewish tradition. Farber also had the temerity to take part in gay pride march to show his solidarity with Canada’s gay citizens. And Farber’s not alone in his views. As one left-wing, anti-racist Jewish activist said, to be a Jew is always to support the oppressed, never the oppressor.

There is no question that in making this accusation, the NEC were very much supporting racism. Mike makes that clear in his blog post about this issue, and condemns it as disgusting.

Nor is Mike alone in finding the NEC’s and Maggie Cousin’s persecution of decent members of the Labour party under the pretext of combating anti-Semitism racist.

Jackie Walker made the same accusation in an event in Islington in May this year, 2018, which was part of a tour of the country by Marc Wadsworth, supported by the comedian Alexei Sayle, and Jackie Walker and others, including a number of Black anti-racism activists. Marc Wadsworth was the Black anti-racism campaigner, who was himself smeared by Ruth Smeeth and a complicit Tory press as an anti-Semite because of a remark he made about her passing on information to a Torygraph hack at Labour party meeting. Wadsworth didn’t know she was Jewish and made no reference to Jews in his comments. But Smeeth, a Zionist and Blairite, smeared him as an anti-Semite anyway.

And as with Walker, it’s a charge that is utterly ridiculous. Wadsworth was a dedicated campaigner, one of his whose achievements was getting the parents of the murdered Black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, to meet Nelson Mandela. He had also worked closely with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in fighting the BNP in the ’80s and ’90s after a series of anti-Semitic assaults in parts of London. He is very, very far from being an anti-Semite. But he was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and so the Blairite and Zionist right of the party chose to smear him in the campaign to topple the Labour leader.

And presiding over the kangaroo court that smeared him as an anti-Semite was – yes, you guessed it! – Maggie Cousins.

The three other Black speakers that evening were also concerned about the racist persecution of the Windrush generation, and anti-Black racism within the Labour party. They claimed that the report by Shami Chakrabarti on racism with in the Labour party, had been ignored when it came to other races. One of these speakers, Angela Lee, a presenter on the Genesis channel, was particularly concerned about low expectations of Black children and the higher rates of expulsion for them in schools, including those in Islington. See http://islingtontribune.com/article/the-muddle-around-a-conflict-within-labour

Cousins is a hard-right Zionist, but she isn’t a member of the Jewish Labour Movement or Jewish Voice for Labour on the other side, and so she masquerades as being impartial.

As for Zionism, non-Zionist Jews like Tony Greenstein and David Rosenberg have argued very strongly and convincingly that it is itself a deeply and perniciously racist ideology. It is anti-Semitic, in the sense that it is a capitulation to anti-Semitism. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, believed that anti-Semitism could not be overcome, and that Jews’ only hope lay in creating a state of their own, for which they should co-operate with anti-Semites. He thus praised Arthur Balfour, for passing the Aliens Act against eastern European Jewish immigration to Britain, as well as the British Brothers’ League, a racist organization campaigning against such immigration. The Zionist organization in Nazi Germany fully supported the racist Nuremberg Laws at the time other Jewish organization were campaigning against them. Its newspaper, the Judischer Rundschau, even told its readers that they should wear the yellow Star of David forced on them by Nazis with pride. Chaim Herzog opposed the kindertransport, which evacuated Jewish German children to Britain. He stated he’d prefer it if nearly all of the Jews in Germany were exterminated, if only a few went to the Jewish settlements in Palestine rather than the majority were saved by going to Britain. In Hungary, Rudolf kasztner made a deal with the Nazis to send some tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps, on the condition that some might be spared to go to Israel.

And Israel is still making alliance with real Nazis and anti-Semites, praising the far-right regimes in Poland and Hungary, and hosting British and American influential far right figures like Stephen Bannon, Richard Spencer and Tommy Robinson. And they have the same vile opportunism towards genuine anti-Semitic atrocities. After the Pittsburgh massacre last weekend, the Israeli ambassador to America claimed the rise in anti-Semitism in America was partly due to ‘left-wing activism on campus’. This was a coded attack on the BDS campaign, amongst other things. He also urged Jews to move to Israel.

The shooter had chosen the Tree of Life synagogue, because they were active helping asylum seekers come to America through a Jewish charity. An Israeli rapper notorious for his Fascistic lyrics odiously declared that you couldn’t blame the shooter and those like him, because they were fed up of liberal Jews interfering in their country’s politics.

Utterly, utterly repugnant.

There is also a very strong streak of what would be rightly seen as anti-Semitism if it came from gentiles in Zionist attacks on Israel-critical Jews. They are viciously attacked as ‘kapos’, with some wishing that their families had died in the Holocaust.

And David Rosenberg on his blog, Rebel Notes, has posted his account of how the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s was strongly opposed to Jews going on anti-racist marches when they were to protect and defend other racial groups. Thus meetings of Jewish anti-racists had to be held in venues like Quaker Meeting Houses because many synagogues closed their doors to them. The official reason was that the Board was afraid Jewish marchers would be exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda. But some left-wing campaigners believed the real reason was that the Conservative Jewish establishment wanted to keep them away from the Left.

And this is apart from Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians, its imprisonment of them in a system of apartheid and slow, ethnic cleansing. None of which can be defended, which is why Israel’s advocates smear those, who criticize it as anti-Semites.

This is what Cousins and Labour’s NEC are supporting: a vicious, hypocritical and persecutory ideology and state, which attacks real anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism. It is an ideology, who strongest advocates in Britain have never wanted British Jews to involve themselves in the struggles of other ethnic groups for equality and dignity. The Israel lobby in the Labour party wishes the genuine sufferings of Blacks in history to be ignored, rather than commemorated with that of the Jews. And for the marginalization of Labour’s Black members and those in Labour-run councils to continue in silence. Ken Livingstone was also concerned about Black representation in the Labour party. It’s in his book, Livingstone’s Labour. Which may well be another reason they smeared him as an anti-Semite.

So perhaps it’s about time we fought back, and named Cousins and the NEC for what they are, and tell them very firmly what we tell the BNP, National Action, the EDL and the rest of the thugs and bully-boys of the Far Right:

Yesterday Mike had his hearing before a Labour party tribunal in Wales to decide the charge against him of being an anti-Semite. As is clear to anyone who reads anything Mike has actually written, rather than lies put out by a corrupt, mendacious press and the Israel lobby, an anti-Semite is the very last thing Mike is. He isn’t at all racist or prejudiced, as a gay friend of his tried to make clear to three men, who suspiciously approached him last week wanting to talk to him about the charge. Mike found that encounter extremely suspicious. They knew him by name, though he’d never met them, and claimed that they’d read about him in the papers, although as Mike wrote on his blog, he only featured in them in May last year, 2017. That’s a long time ago. It could all have been perfectly innocuous, but Mike wondered if they weren’t there to intimidate him in the last few days before he defended himself. It’s quite possible. It also wouldn’t have surprised me if they weren’t private detectives hired by someone to see if they couldn’t dig any dirt on him. It’d be odd, but it’s not unknown.

And then there was the trial itself. As Mike has said in detail in his blog, it was a complete kangaroo court. They had no evidence against him whatsoever. None. Zip. Nada, nichts, and nitchevo. But it didn’t matter. They were obviously determined to find him guilty. I have absolutely no doubt Mike defended himself to the very best of his ability, and that, were it a properly constituted court of law, he would have won the case. Either that, or even now his lawyers would be filing objections to a miscarriage of justice. But this is the Labour party witch hunt against Corbynites, so truth didn’t matter.

What apparently did matter was how his comments appeared, especially to the ‘Jewish community’. As the numerous left-wing Jewish bloggers on the internet have said with great clarity, there is no monolithic Jewish community. Judaism has always been a community of different opinions and views, as shown by the old Jewish adage, ‘Two Jews, three opinions’. The group the press have chosen to present as Britain’s Jewish community are the official, Jewish Zionist establishment, the Chief Rabbi and Board of Deputies of British Jews. Which basically represents the United Synagogue and no-one else. They don’t represent the secular Jewish community, nor Orthodox Jews. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is solidly Zionist, as defined by their constitution. So they don’t represent non- or anti-Zionist Jews. Tony Greenstein has also cited proper sociological studies from respected scholars, which show that British Jews are almost wholly upper middle class. This doesn’t mean that British Jews are all Conservatives by any means, but those making the smears of anti-Semitism certainly are, as you can see from the political bias of the Jewish Chronicle. It’s a Conservative, business-oriented, religious establishment using anti-Semitism as a tool for smearing its opponents because they threaten them as Socialists seeking to empower ordinary people – which includes Jews – and support the Palestinians in their desperate search for justice against Israeli oppression. And this Conservative, Zionist Jewish establishment is closely interwoven with the Blairites in the Labour party. Blair’s followers are a minority, and always were. But they control the party bureaucracy, or at least key positions in it.

And in that position, they behave as the Stalinists they revile Corbyn’s supporters of being. Before Stalin came to power, the position of General Secretary in the Communist party was a relatively minor post. The secretary was there basically to make sure that only those of good character were party members. Which is incredible, I know, given the bloody history of the Russian Communist party and its satellites in eastern Europe. They gave it to Stalin, because everybody thought he was thick, and would be satisfied with the post. His job would be to throw out the drunks and seducers. Instead, Stalin used his position to purge the party of his opponents, and cram it with his supporters. As the old butcher said, ‘It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.’

And this has been the strategy the Blairites and their allies, the Israel lobby, have adopted in attacking genuine, Socialist Labour party members. They’ve launched a purge of the party, using anti-Semitism and other, equally vague charges as the pretext to get rid of awkward members. And so they have smeared decent, anti-racist men and women. Not just Mike, but also Marc Wadsworth and Jackie Walker, two people of colour, who have been dedicated anti-racists that have consistently battled bigotry and Fascism. Just like Ken Livingstone, who is also no anti-Semite, as is shown very clearly in his book, Livingstone’s Labour. Like Tony Greenstein, a Jewish member of the party, like Walker, and like her and Wadsworth, also an ardent opponent of Fascism. And there are so many people like them. As I’ve pointed out, ad nauseam, the decent people they’ve smeared as anti-Semites and worse include self-respecting Jews, people who have suffered real anti-Semitism, including assault. People who lost family members in the Shoah, or whose parents were lucky enough to survive the horrors of the camps. People, who should never be insulted with such smears.

And some of the charges are risible. One man was accused of being an anti-Semite, because he posted a photo-shopped image of a jobcentre sign saying, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. This was the slogan above the gates of Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. It means roughly ‘Work Makes You Free’. Which is the attitude of the Tory party. One of them even wrote a newspaper article using the phrase, until someone spotted it and realized that quoting Nazi slogans against those they persecuted wasn’t going to go down too well with the British public, and the offending paragraphs were removed. And the concentration camps didn’t just contain Jews. They held others the Nazis considered politically or biologically undesirable, like Socialists, trade unionists, Communists, prostitutes, recidivist criminals, the mentally ill, Russian prisoners of war and other slave workers from the Slav peoples, and Romanies. The charge against this fellow was so weak it could have been blown over in a light wind. But nevertheless, he was accused and convicted by people, who had already decided the answer.

It’s also very clear from Mike’s article that they didn’t like him refuting their attacks on other party members in public. This was bringing the party into disrepute. In fact they did that the moment they made their false accusations. The overwhelming concern here, it seems, was to preserve the reputation of the people further up the party, who made the accusations. It’s a very, very authoritarian attitude. Important people have spoken – don’t contradict them! And, to quote the Japanese proverb, the nail that stands up must be hammered down. Blair and his cronies always were authoritarian, centralizing power around them and making it very clear that dissent from Old Labour would very definitely not be tolerated. And so they were determined not to let their superiors be embarrassed by having the public shown the facts.

And it was clear from their choice of chair that Mike was never going to get a fair hearing. The person is charge was Maggie Cousins, who has form in these matters. From what I gather, this is what she does. She presides over these kangaroo courts as a kind of corporate hatchetwoman.

This was, ultimately, a PR stunt to reassure a Zionist Jewish establishment, that will never tolerate a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn, no matter what concessions are made to it, and a wider, Tory media that is seizing on any and every possible opportunity to misrepresent the Labour party as a threat to society.

I’m very impressed by Mike’s speech to them, citing Stan ‘the Man’ Lee, the creator of Marvel Comic’s superheroes with ‘Jolly’ Jack Kirby. Lee, Kirby and the majority of the creators of America’s comics industry were Jews. Lee’s real name was Stanley Martin Leiber. Kirby’s was Jake Kurzberg. There was little specifically Jewish in the comics, except that occasionally there was the odd Yiddish word or two. But there was a concern for the marginalized, and racially persecuted. This was shown in metaphorical form in the X-Men, an underground of young mutants, feared and persecuted for their special powers by outside society, and in more overt forms when Blaxsploitation emerged in the ’70s, and Marvel gave us heroes like Powerman, alias Luke Cage, hero for hire, the Black Panther, Brother Voodoo and more. And as I’ve described before, the tales did show very clearly how the Nazis regarded and treated Jews, albeit in science fictional form. These strips together preached an anti-racist message, which could sometimes be overt, as when the Black Panther went up against the Klan, or when an Adolf Hitler clone took the guise of the Hatemonger to turn Americans against each other. These were the comics Mike and I read as kids, and which definitely influenced us. They taught racial tolerance, respect and co-operation, and that bigotry, racism and oppression must be fought and defeated, at all times, everywhere. And Stan and his fellow inmates of the merry Marvel madhouse spread that vital message through the medium of popular literature – the comics. They aren’t great literature, although there’s some truly great writing and superb art in a medium that has often been critically reviled and disparaged. But they were read and enjoyed by millions, and in their way helped to make Anglophone society more tolerant. That’s Stan’s legacy to the world, which Mike duly paid tribute to in his speech at the end.

RIP, Stan Lee, a true titan of the four-colour funny papers.

It’s disgusting that Mike, and so many others have been treated this way by a party that should be defending people like him and the others against a predatory, Conservative establishment. Rather than propping up it up with lies, smears and derisory pretence at justice, presided over by faceless bureaucrats and cynical, moral cowards.

Mike’s made it very clear that he will fight on to clear his name and redress this gross injustice. I wish him all the best, as I do everyone else, who has been smeared by these bullying moral vacuities.

This is the cover of a very old Private Eye for Friday, 2nd October 1998. The caption reads ‘Blair Calls For Unity’, and has Blair saying in the speech bubble ‘There’s a leftie – chuck him out!’

This was the time when Blair was trying to modernize the Labour party by removing Clause 4, the part of its constitution formulated by the Fabians and other socialists, which committed the party to the nationalization of the means of production and distribution. In short, socialism. Blair instead was determined to turn it into another Thatcherite party committed to privatization, including that of the NHS, welfare cuts, and job insecurity. Its traditional working class base were to be ignored and the party instead was to concentrate on winning swing voters, who might otherwise vote Tory. He attempted to win over the Tory press, including the Murdoch papers. Despite owing the start of his career to union sponsorship, he was determined to limit their power even further, and threatened to cut the party’s ties with them unless they submitted to his dictates. His ‘Government Of All the Talents’ – GOATs – included former Tory ministers like Chris Patten. Tories, who crossed the floor and defected to New Labour were parachuted into safe seats as the expense of sitting MPs and the wishes of the local constituency party. Blair adopted failed or discarded Tory policies, including the Peter Lilley’s Private Finance Initiative and the advice of Anderson Consulting. This was satirized by a computer programme that made anagrams from politicians’ names. Anthony Blair came out as ‘I am Tory Plan B’.

The direction in which Blair wanted the party to move was clearly shown by him inviting Margaret Thatcher to 10 Downing Street to visit the day after he was elected. And she thoroughly approved of him, declaring that New Labour was her greatest legacy.

Blair and New Labour were also staunch supporters of Israel. It was money from Zionist Jewish businessmen, raised by Lord Levy, whom Blair had met at a gathering at the Israeli embassy, that allowed him to be financially independent from the trade unions.

Now all that is being threatened by Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Which is why Blairite apparatchiks and MPs have done their level best to purge the party of them by smearing them as Trotskyite and Stalinist infiltrators and anti-Semites. The charges are ludicrous, hypocritical and offensive. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t far left: they’re traditional Labour, supporting a mixed economy. And far from being anti-Semites, the vast majority of those accused are decent, anti-racist people, including self-respecting Jews and dedicated campaigners against anti-Semitism. People like Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Mike over at Vox Political, Martin Odoni and many, many others. Many of the Jews smeared as anti-Semites are Holocaust survivors or the children of Holocaust survivors, but this is never reported in the media. Except when the person supposedly attacked is a good Blairite or member of the Israel lobby.

The cover was made in jest when it came out, though it had an element of truth even then. Now it’s even more true. Blair has left the party leadership, but his supporters in Progress and similar groups are determined to cling on to power by carrying out a purge of Corbyn and his traditional Labour supporters.

Just as Blair himself emerged to urge Blairite MPs and Labour members to leave and join his proposed ‘Centrist’ party.

This is something that won’t surprise critics and opponents of Israel such as Tony Greenstein. But I doubt you’re going to find it reported any time soon in the mainstream news, because, according to the Israel lobby, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, reporting or repeating any of Israel’s well-documented historical connections to real, genuine Fascism and Nazism is ‘anti-Semitic’. The show notes that the mainstream press are beginning to cover Fascism in the Ukraine. But even so, it’s going to be a very long time before they cover this.

In this edition of the Real News, host Ben Norton talks to the journalist Max Blumenthal about Asa Winstanley’s article in the Electronic Intifada revealing that the Israelis have sold arms to Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. The sales were uncovered by human rights lawyers in Israel, and the guns themselves shown off by the Azov Battalion itself on their own website. These are tavor rifles, very distinctive weapons issued to Israeli squaddies. They replaced the Uzi, and were used against some of the protestors in Gaza.

Blumenthal and Norton talk about the Azov Battalion, which adopts the Wolfsangel insignia of the WW2 SS auxiliaries. It was founded by Biletsky, as part of the National Patriot movement, which was itself part of the Social Nationalist Party. Members of the Battalion also wear SS tattoos, and have been photographed giving the stiff right arm Nazi salute. The organisation runs paramilitary training camps, including for children. They are anti-Semites, islamophobic and White supremacist. They have launched attacks on Roma and Jews. The organisation has now been incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces, which gives Israel some plausible deniability, in that they can claim they are giving aid to Ukraine, not neo-Nazis. But it’s a very specious, thin defence.

Biletsky himself has said that he intends to restore the honour of the White race. He declared that if he got into power, he would abolish the Ukrainian parliament. The ethnic cleansing of Ukraine is the first step in their campaign of ‘Reconquista’, bring the race war to the rest of Europe in order to cleanse them of Jews, Roma and non-Whites. Monto, a western Fascist was arrested when tried travelling to Ukraine to join the Battalion. He intended to return to France to launch attacks on synagogues and mosques.

The Azov Battalion has also been given aid by the Canadians. They recently sent a military attache over there to hold talks with the Battalion’s leaders. When questioned on this, they said it would increase plurality and personal tolerance. Blumenthal points out that the current Canadian foreign minister, Freeland, is a Ukrainians, whose father was a Fascist collaborator, who was recruited over here during the Cold War. When three Russian diplomats had the temerity to point it out, Justin Trudeau expelled them, rather than remove Freeland.

Blumenthal also suggests that the Israelis in this case may be just proxies for American itself. He describes how, in the 1980s, Congress tried to halt arms sales to South American Fascists, such as the Contras in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the Fascist regime in Guatemala, by demanding that the president personally sign any order to do so. As a result, Reagan’s regime turned instead to using the Israelis to convey arms to them. And the South American Fascist were hugely appreciative. Rios Montt, one of the leaders of these truly genocidal regimes, declared fulsomely that his regime and its death squads were full participants in the ‘spirit of Israel’ and went on to praise the Israeli state.

This is the reason, Blumenthal concludes, why he is not surprised that Israel should now be sending arms to a violently anti-Semitic Nazi organisation, despite the way it purports and postures as the defenders of Jews everywhere.

Here’s the clip:

It’s been the argument of Tony Greenstein and the other principled critics of Israel, like Asa Winstanley, that Israel has never cared about defending Jews from Fascism, except when there is a possibility that some would move to Israel. There are numerous statements from the earliest Zionist leaders stating that if all the Jews in Europe moved to England to escape the Holocaust and survived, they would far prefer it if only half survived and the rest moved to Israel. During the Second World War, Kasztner, the leader of the Zionists in Hungary, made a deal to send tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps in order that the Nazis would send some few to Israel.

This is the shameful history the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Labour Movement and the rest of the Israel lobby are trying to hide when they smear decent people, who dare to talk about it. Like Red Ken and his comments about the Haavara Agreement.

The Azov Battalion and the regime it serves are Nazis. As well as Jews and Roma, they are also attacking pro-Russian Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in the east of the country. And it looks like they’re being used as proxies in a war against Putin.

Putin is a thug, no question. But these guys are worse. They’re true Nazis. And no regime or organisation that genuinely respects human rights, and cares for the safety of Jews, Muslims, Gypsies, blacks or any other ethnic minority, should be giving them any form of aid or succour.

Way back on the 18th of last month I posted that I was going into hospital for 2 1/2 weeks for the intensive dose therapy for myeloma. Myeloma is a type of blood cancer, which causes anaemia, loss of calcium, and attacks the bones and kidneys. Since about a decade ago it’s been treated with a number of drugs, which avoid the side-effect of traditional chemotherapy. I was diagnosed with the disease last September.

However, after that phase of the course of treatment has finished, they then call you in for a more intense course of treatment to drive the disease further back into remission. Your own stem cells are removed, ready to be returned to you to jump start your own immune system. You are also called into hospital and put in isolation. In Bristol’s BRI you are given your own room. You have a piccline inserted running from your bicep to almost to your heart, through which they administer the drugs. They then give you a dose of malophan, the drug that they originally used to treat the disease. The next day, they also give you back your own stem cells, and a few days later they also give you back the platelets they removed.

Throughout the whole period you are carefully monitored, given drugs, both in pill form and in infusions to deal with the effects of the cancer treatment. The doctors see you every day to see how you’re coping. If you have problems eating, you may also a nutritionist, while a physiotherapist will also visit to advise you on gentle exercises if you are weak.

I shudder to think how much all this would cost under the private insurance system in America, which the Tories and New Labour so much admire, even while they’re prating about how much they ‘treasure’ the NHS.

They released me yesterday, and it’s good to be home. The treatment has, however, left me as weak as the proverbial kitten, with a sore mouth, and diarrhoea. I’ve been prescribed and given mouthwashes and drugs for some of these effects. The booklets for the treatment state that it may be 2/3 months, or even 5-6 months, before you make a complete recovery. So don’t expect very much energetic blogging!

I cannot fault the treatment given by the medical and the ancillary staff. They were professional, friendly, courteous and reassuring. I found the treatment very difficult, but they were at pains to say, ‘This is not the ‘new you’. You will recover.’ And it can be very interesting talking to the ancillary staff, some of whom were non-White immigrants, and hearing their stories and perspectives. The NHS certainly has benefit from the skills and dedication brought to it by its medical professionals and ancillary staff from across the world, whether Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, or eastern Europe. And the health service is suffering because many of these are being forced to return home, or look elsewhere for work, because of Tweezer and Brexit.

I’m afraid I haven’t been blogging very much while in hospital, despite my best intentions. Their wifi system simply wouldn’t let me. The hospital wifi system was insecure, so that anyone geographically near me could see my passwords if I went to a site that require them. So the system simply refused to let me on after I posted up those couple of pieces to the blog about George Galloway winning his libel battle against the Torygraph, and New Labour’s desperate policy to stop NHS hospitals owning and operating their own MRI scanners, as opposed to leasing them from private firms. So I spent my time in bed trying to read an SF novel by the awesome Paul McAuley, and re-reading a few old copies of Private Eye and Clive James’ The Crystal Bucket. This last is a collection of James’ old TV reviews from the 1970s from the Observer. James started out as a radical socialist, and then move right, eventually ending up in the Torygraph. An intellectual, with a tendency to show off, he nevertheless took trash culture very seriously, at a time when many intellectuals did dismiss television. One of the jokes about it used to be ‘Why is television a medium? Because it’s neither rare nor well done’. Which is true of a lot, but not all. And James stated that heartfelt trash culture was worth far more than bad high art, like Michael Tippet’s A Child Of Our Time. The ’70s were also the decade of the Vietnam War and the horrors of the CIA coup in Chile, George Kissinger’s support of genocidal, murderous dictators across the world as part of the campaign against Communism, Watergate, and TV dramas about the Holocaust, all of which he reviewed, along with Star Trek, Dr. Who, Miss World, the World Disco-Dancing Championships, the footie and the athletics. Quite apart from more highbrow productions of Shakespeare, intense dramas, and the horrors of the classic BBC series, I, Claudius, set under the deprave reign of Caligula.

He also reviewed an interview with the old Fascist, Oswald Mosley. Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and a series of successive Fascist movements after the Second World War. He was very definitely persona non grata for many years, until he partly rehabilitated himself with the publication of his autobiography, My Life. He then got a job doing book reviews for the Telegraph. Mosley was a fan of Mussolini and then Adolf Hitler. When Mussolini was overshadowed by Hitler as the great Fascist dictator, Mosley changed the name of the BUF to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’. He corresponded very amicably with the Nazis, although claimed during the War that in the event of an invasion of Britain he would not serve as this country’s Quisling, the traitor leader of Norway. And in the interview the old thug constantly denied being an anti-Semite, claiming that the attacks and violence were instead all the fault of the Jews. All the while making it clear that he still identified them with the ‘money power’, which was secretly ruling from behind the scenes. James said of him that he didn’t so much proclaim anti-Semitism as embody it. There’s much to blog about in James’ TV criticism from this period. I especially want to do a piece about this interview with Mosley to show the difference between real anti-Semites, and those decent people, who have been smeared as such by the Israel lobby, New Labour and the Tory press. People like Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, mike, my brother, Tony Greenstein and so many, many others. Absolutely none of whom are in any way, shape or form anything like the real Nazis and anti-Semites, like Mosley or the characters now crawling out into public view from the Alt-Right and Libertarians.

I spent part of yesterday evening trying to answer the various comments that had built up on this blog over the past few weeks. I really appreciate all the messages of support and encouragements to get well and get blogging soon! It was really great and encouraging to read. I feel fortunate that I have people like you all following my blog.

I’m still quite ill at the moment, but I hope to pick up and carry on blogging as far as I can. And I hope you all are enjoying good health, and haven’t suffered too much from the heat these past weeks. With luck, it shouldn’t be too long before it’s business as usual. I hope.

Private Eye has published much excellent material, and over the past few days I’ve blogged about some of the material revealed in this fortnight’s issue. But the magazine does have a very pronounced anti-Corbyn bias, and does seem to have swallowed, and regurgitated all the bilge smearing Corbyn and his supporters in the other parts of the lamestream media. It does seem to take as fact that the smears that Momentum is full of abusive misogynists and anti-Semites, and that the Labour leader and his supporters are ‘hard Left’ and Trotskyites. They aren’t. Corbyn and Momentum really are just traditional Labour, standing for the old Social Democratic policy of a mixed economy, and strong and healthy NHS and welfare state. All of which is anathema to the Thatcherite right – the Blairites – who have tried to position themselves as moderates when in fact the truth is, they’re the extremists. They’re extreme right. And outside the Labour party this is also unwelcome to the Tories and the mainstream media and its bosses pushing for more privatisation and further policies to destroy the welfare state and push the working class further into poverty. Because they see it as good for business having a cowed workforce on poverty wages.

In this fortnight’s Eye, for 15th-28th June 2018 on page 10, the pseudonymous ‘Ratbiter’ has published an article attacking a Facebook group for those suspended from the Labour party, and the attempts of its members to make contact with officials close to Corbyn to obtain justice or redress. It accepts absolutely uncritically the charges against them. And the end of the article once again repeats the claim that those suspended for anti-Semitism are automatically guilty, with an example of an anti-Semitic post from one of those in the group.

But many of those suspended from the Labour party for anti-Semitism and other offences are anything but, as shown in the cases of people like Mike, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and very many others. As I’ve blogged about ad nauseam, ad infinitum. The article therefore needs to be carefully critiqued. It runs

Suspended Animation
Facebook has a secret and carefully vetted political group called Labour Party Compliance: Suspensions, Expulsions, Rejections Co-op. As the ungainly title suggests, it is a online hangout where Corbyn supporters facing disciplinary action for abuse, anti-Semitism and other loveable quirks can nurse their grievances in private. Or so they think.

Screenshots of the site obtained by the Eye show that the outcasts are not so far out in the cold they don’t have access to the highest levels of Corbyn’s Labour.

Take 17-year-old Zac Arnold, who has been suspended from the Forest of Dean Labour Party. He revealed he had “been given the email of someone called Thomas Gardiner by James Schneider at JC’s office, who said he would be a useful contact over my suspension”. He asked his fellow pariahs “what your thoughts are and if you know him”.

They certainly knew Schneider. “I have chatted with James,” said Caroline Tipler, the founder of the “Jeremy Corbyn Leads Us to Victory” Facebook group. “I def think it would be useful to make contact”. The best way to get back into the party would be to start by “making a tentative enquiry and gauge from the response whether to progress it from there”.

The “someone called Thomas Gardiner” to whom young Zac referred is a Labour councillor from Camden. When Corbyn assumed total control of the Labour machine in March by installing Jennie Formby, Len McCluskey’s former mistress, as Labour’s general secretary, Formby’s first act was to call in Gardiner.She sent John Stoliday, the head of Labour’s compliance unit, on gardening leave and put Gardiner in charge of overseeing complaints against members. So he is certainly a “useful” man to know for as any Corbyn supporter facing troublesome allegations – as indeed is Schneider, who works in the leader’s office alongside fellow Old Wykehamist Seumas Milne as Corbyn’s director of strategic communications.

Suspended members appear to think that, so long as they discuss their prejudices in private, they will be fine. Their Facebook group is splattered with posts painting Labour activists as victims of a Jewish conspiracy. “They will try to silence you,” reads one. “They will try to discredit you. Because you are not allowed to criticise Jewish politics.” But their own group suggests
that you are, as long as you aren’t caught and have friends in high places.

So what’s going on here? Well, first of all, the fact that Ratbiter claims to have had screenshots passed to him of the Facebook page shows that it’s not based on his research. It’s from an outside organisation. From the way this is about smearing Corbyn supporters as anti-Semites, it looks like it’s the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism or the Jewish Labour Movement up to their vile tricks again. The CAA’s modus operandi is simply to go back over people’s internet conversations in search of something vaguely anti-Semitic they can use, and then grossly distort it so that they can smear them. They did it to Mike, taking his comments out of context and grossly misreporting what he actually said. They did it to Jackie Walker and her conversation with two others on Facebook about the Jewish participation in the slave trade. Again, a serious issue, which reputable historians are discussing. Walker never said that Jews were responsible for the slave trade, or that they were exclusively in charge of it. She said that the ultimate responsibility lay with the Christian monarchs and states which employed them. There are, however, real anti-Semites, who claim that the Jews were responsible for the slave trade, and so the CAA smeared her, a practicing Jew with a Jewish partner, as an anti-Semite. Just like they’ve smeared Ken Livingstone, because he dared to talk about an embarrassing truth: that the Nazis did reach an agreement with the Zionists to send Jews to Israel, before they decided on the Final Solution. And then there was that entirely artificial controversy a month or so ago, where they smeared Corbyn himself as an anti-Semite, because of a post he made admiring a piece of street art showing bankers around a table resting on the bodies of black men. Only two of the bankers were Jewish, but nevertheless, the CAA and the Board of Deputies of British Jews frothed that it was ‘anti-Semitic’, trying to link it to all the vile theories about the Jewish banking conspiracy.

Unable to unseat Corbyn at the leadership elections, the Blairites and the Israel lobby have been trying to oust him gradually by suspending and smearing his supporters. As happened to Mike. The CAA’s vile article smearing him was passed on to the Labour party, who suspended him just as he was about to fight a council election as the Labour candidate in his part of mid-Wales. As Mike has blogged, he has appealed against his suspension, but was tried once again by another kangaroo court, very much like the one that decided that the veteran anti-racist campaigner, Marc Wadsworth, was an anti-Semite. The Labour party’s compliance unit is so determined to refuse justice to expelled or suspended members on trumped up charges of anti-Semitism, that there is now an organisation set up to fight them on this issue: Labour Against the Witch Hunt, one of whose organisers is the redoubtable Tony Greenstein. I think another is Walker herself. As for Wadsworth, he has gone on a triumphant tour defending himself up and down the country. His campaign was launched in London with Alexei Sayle. Sayle’s parents are Romanian Jews, who were card-carrying Communists, and Sayle himself was one of the leaders of the new, politically correct Alternative Comedy in the 1980s. He was very anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-gay rights, as were the others that emerged at the same time. So he is very definitely not anti-Semitic.

Clearly, the movement to discredit the smear campaign against decent people unfairly libelled as anti-Semites is gaining ground, otherwise Ratbiter wouldn’t bother writing the article, and attacking and revealing the officials close to Corbyn, who may be prepared to give assistance to them.

Now let’s deal with their quotation that ‘you are not allowed to criticise Jewish politics’. Is this anti-Semitic? Or is simply a clumsy way of expressing a truth: that any criticism of Israel, or support for the Palestinians, will result in you being smeared and suspended. I strongly believe it’s the latter. And the issue of Israel has been deliberately confused with Jews by Israel and its satellite, Zionist organisations themselves. Netanyahu a few years ago declared that all Jews, everywhere, were citizens of Israel. Of course, it’s a risible statement. Many Jews don’t want to be citizens of Israel, a land with which they have no connection, and certainly not at the expense of the country’s real, indigenous inhabitants. Netanyahu and the other maniacs in his coalition don’t want all Jews to be citizens of their country either. Liberal or genuinely left-wing Jews, or Jews, who simply ask too many questions about the Palestinians and dare to think for themselves, rather than swallow Likudnik propaganda, aren’t let in. or if they’re there already, they get thrown out. As have dissident Israelis, like one historian now at Exeter University, Ilon Pappe, who was driven out of his homeland because he dared to describe and protest his nation’s long history of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

The organisations behind the smear campaign are Jewish organisations, or claim to be pro-Jewish, like the CAA and the Jewish Labour Movement, which was formerly Paole Zion, ‘Workers of Zion’. Now these organisations clearly don’t represent all Jews. They only represent those, who are fanatically and intolerantly pro-Israel. They also have gentile members, so it’s highly questionable just how ‘Jewish’ these Jewish organisations are. Those smeared by them include self-respecting and Torah-observant Jews, and they have subjected them to the kind of abuse, which would automatically be considered anti-Semitic if it came from a non-Jew. Indeed, many of the Jews smeared by them feel that there is a particular hatred of Jewish critics of Israel. Just like the founders of Zionism were absolutely dismissive of diaspora Jews.

Given this, it should be no surprise if a non-Jew, who has been smeared, becomes confused and says that you can’t criticise ‘Jewish politics’, meaning Israel. Because these Jewish organisations, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews, insist that you can’t. And deliberately so, in order to make it easier to claim that all critics of Israel are anti-Semites.

This is a nasty, mischievous and deceitful article. It is designed to further isolate Corbyn by smearing his supporters and attacking the official close to him, who may be able help them. And it repeats the lie that all of those smeared are anti-Semites. It’s publication is a disgrace to Private Eye.

Last week the editor of the Groaniad, Kath Viner, spiked a cartoon by the paper’s Steve Bell for supposed anti-Semitism. The cartoon commented on the complete indifference to the murder of 21 year old Palestinian medic, Razan al-Najjar by the IDF shown by Netanyahu and Tweezer. Bell depicted the two having a cosy chat by the fire, in which al-Najjar was burning. This was too much for Viner, who immediately did what the Israel lobby always does whenever the country is criticised for its brutal treatment of the Palestinians: she immediately accused the critic of anti-Semitism. The cartoon was anti-Semitic, apparently, because al-Najjar’s place in the fire was supposedly a reference to the Holocaust and the murder of the Jews in the Nazi gas ovens. Despite the fact that Bell denied that there was any such intention in his work, or indeed, any overt references to the Holocaust at all.

Bell was naturally outraged, and issued a strong denial. I’ve blogged about this issue, as has Mike, and Bell’s denial was also covered by that notorious pro-Putin propaganda channel, RT. And an Israel-based journalist, Jonathan Cook, has also come down solidly on Bell’s side and against censorship.

Mike posted a piece reporting and commenting on Mr Cook’s view and analysis of the case on Saturday. Cook is a former Guardian journalist, who now lives in Nazareth, the capital of Israel’s Palestinian minority. Cook praised Bell’s cartoon because of the way it held power to account, and indicted the powerful and their calculations at the expense of the powerless. He stated

In other words, it represents all that is best about political cartoons, or what might be termed graphic journalism. It holds power – and us – to account.

He then went on to describe how, by siding with Israel over the cartoon, the Guardian was siding with the powerful against the powerless; with a nuclear-armed state against its stateless minority. He then goes on to make the point that when criticism of Israel is silenced, the country benefits from a kind of reverse anti-Semitism, or philo-Semitism, which turns Israel into a special case. He writes

When a standard caricature of Netanyahu – far less crude than the caricatures of British and American leaders like Blair and Trump – is denounced as anti-Semitic, we are likely to infer that Israeli leaders expect and receive preferential treatment. When showing Netanyahu steeped in blood – as so many other world leaders have been – is savaged as a blood libel, we are likely to conclude that Israeli war crimes are uniquely sanctioned. When Netanyahu cannot be shown holding a missile, we may assume that Israel has dispensation to bombard Gaza, whatever the toll on civilians.

And when we see the furore created over a cartoon like Bell’s, we can only surmise that other, less established cartoonists will draw the appropriate conclusion: keep away from criticising Israel because it will harm your personal and professional reputation.

He then makes the point that doing so plays into the hands of real anti-Semites, and generates more:

When we fail to hold Israel to account; when we concede to Israel, a nuclear-armed garrison state, the sensitivities of a Holocaust victim; when we so mistake moral priorities that we elevate the rights of a state over the rights of the Palestinians it victimises, we not only fuel the prejudices of the anti-Semite but we make his arguments appealing to others. We do not help to stamp out anti-Semitism, we encourage it to spread. That is why Viner and the Guardian have transgressed not just against Bell, and against the art of political cartoons, and against justice for the Palestinians, but also against Jews and their long-term safety.

Mike goes on to make the point that we need to be more critical about the raving paranoiacs, who see anti-Semitism in Steve Bell’s cartoon, and also in Gerald Scarfe’s depiction of Netanyahu building his anti-Palestinian wall using the blood and bodies of the Palestinians themselves. This was attacked by Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, as ‘anti-Semitic’, who claimed that it was a reference to the Blood Libel. It wasn’t, but the I apologised anyway. Mike goes on to say that there is no such thing as an unintentional anti-Semite, but authorial intentions are routinely ignored in these cases.

He then goes to state very clearly that as the authorial intentions of these cartoons weren’t anti-Semitic, Viner was wrong about Bell’s cartoon. Just as the Sunset Times, as Private Eye dubbed the rag, was wrong about Scarfe and Mike himself, as was the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. And so are the people, who’ve accused Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and so many others of anti-Semitism. And in the meantime, Netanyahu gets away with mass murder.

Mike concludes

But Mr Cook is right – these attitudes only fuel real anti-Semitism among those who draw the only logical conclusion about what’s going on in the media, which is that the Establishment is protecting the Israeli government against censure for its crimes.

It suggests to me that all those involved in this charade have been creating problems that will come back to harm all of us in the future.

Now part of the problem here could be certain developments in anti-racism and postmodernist literary theory. For example, some anti-racist activists have argued that there is such a thing as unconscious racism, and have used it to accuse people and material they have seen as spreading or legitimising racism, but without any conscious intent to do so.

In postmodernist literary theory, the author’s intent is irrelevant. In the words of one French postmodernist literary theorist, ‘all that exists is the text’. And one person’s interpretation of the text is as good as another’s.

Hence, those arguing that the above cartoons are anti-Semitic, could do so citing these ideas above.

Now there clearly is something to unconscious racism. If you look back at some of the discussions and depictions of racial issues in 1970s popular culture, they are often horrendously racist by today’s standards. But they weren’t seen as such then, and I dare say many of those responsible for some of them genuinely didn’t believe they were being racist, nor intended to do so. And unconscious racism is irrelevant in this case too. The accusers have not argued that these cartoons are unconsciously racist. They’ve simply declared that they are, without any kind of qualification. Which implies that their authors must be deliberately anti-Semitic, which is a gross slur.

As for postmodernist literary theory, the accusers haven’t cited that either. And if they did, it could also easily be turned against them. If there are no privileged readings of a particular text, then the view of someone, who thought Bell’s cartoon was anti-Semitic, is no more valid than the person, who didn’t. Which cuts the ground out from such accusations. That argument doesn’t stand up either, though here again, the people making the accusations of anti-Semitism haven’t used it.

Nevertheless, their arguments about the anti-Semitic content of these cartoons and the strained parallels they find with the Holocaust, or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, are very reminiscent of the postmodernist texts the American mathematician Sokal, and the Belgian philosopher Bricmont, used to demolish the intellectual pretensions of postmodernism in their 1990s book, Intellectual Impostures. One of the texts they cited was by a French feminist arguing that women were being prevented from taking up careers in science. It’s a fair point, albeit still controversial amongst some people on the right. However, part of her evidence for this didn’t come from studies showing that girls start off with a strong interest in science like boys, only to have it crushed out of them later in their schooling. No! This strange individual based part of her argument on the medieval coat of arms for Brussels, which shows frogs in a marsh. Which somehow represents the feminine. Or at least, it did to her. For most of us, the depiction of frogs in a marsh in the coat of arms for Brussels is a depiction of precisely that: frogs in a marsh. Because, I have no doubt, the land Brussels was founded on was marshy.

But Cook and Mike are right about these accusations, and the favouritism shown to Israel, playing into the hands of anti-Semites.

The storm troopers of the right are very fond of a quote from Voltaire: ‘If you want to know who rules over you, ask who it is you can’t criticise’. Or words to that effect. Depending on whether the person using the quote is an anti-Semite or an Islamophobe, the answer they’ll give will be ‘the Jews’ or ‘the Muslims’.

Of course, their choice of the French Enlightenment philosopher is more than somewhat hypocritical. Voltaire hated intolerance, and in the early stages before it became aggressively anti-religious, the French Revolution stood for religious toleration. A set of playing cards made to celebrate it showed on one card the Bible with the Talmud, the Jewish holy book containing extra-Biblical lore and guidance, and the Qu’ran.

But by ruling that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, the Israel lobby very much appears to show – entirely falsely – that the anti-Semites are right, and that the Jews really are in control of the rest of us. It gives an utterly false, specious confirmation of the very conspiracy theories they claim to have found in the works of the people they denounce. The same conspiracy theories they claim to oppose, and which have been responsible for the horrific suffering of millions of innocent Jews.

It’s high time this was stopped, and accusations of anti-Semitism treated with the same impartial judgement as other claims of bias or racism. And false accusations should be firmly rejected as a slur, and apologies and restitution demanded from the libellers.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the rising Tory star and archaic ‘minister for the 18th century’, as he’s been dubbed, last week seemed to show very clearly the extent of his ambitions. He bought a townhouse overlooking Downing Street. Despite his denials that this showed his intention of occupying No. 10, everyone else took it as a clear sign that he very definitely does have his sights on becoming Prime Minister.

Rees-Mogg is a true-blue Tory aristo, who began his career by campaigning to keep the unreformed, and unelected House of Lords. He has consistently voted to increase spending, tax cuts and other privileges for the rich, and to cut and deny state aid, welfare benefits and spending on the poor, the unemployed and the disabled. He has a vast income provided by his investment firms. And he’s also the son of William Rees-Mogg, the former editor of the Times and later columnist for the Independent.

I found this passage quoting and commenting on a piece Rees-Mogg senior wrote at the time, welcoming the Fascist coup by General Pinochet which overthrew Salvador Allende, in Colin Sparks’ article, ‘The Media and the State’ in James Curran, Jake Ecclestone, Giles Oakley and Alan Richardson, eds., Bending Reality: The State of the Media (London: Pluto Press 1986). Allende was a democratically elected Marxist, who enraged his country’s ruling elite by wishing to expropriate land from their estates to give to the peasants. He was also a danger to the American-led global campaign against Communism, simply because his regime had taken power through popular elections. It contradicted the view that Communism could only gain power through very undemocratic means, like revolutions and coups. And so the CIA backed Pinochet’s coup against Allende, which plunged the country into a brutal Fascist dictatorship that lasted from c. 1974 to the early 1990s.

Before quoting Rees-Mogg senior, Sparks also describes how the elite will try to bring down any government genuinely trying to create a more democratic, equal society, and eliminate poverty using ideological as well as other weapons, one of which will be the establishment press. He writes

Any government which seeks to get rid of poverty and inequality will come up against the opposition of those whose life has been built upon the fruits of poverty and inequality. Any government which seeks to establish democracy as the common norm for the conduct of human affairs will come up against the opposition of those whose whole life has been built upon the exercise of irresponsible and unaccountable power. The people who run the state, the media, industry and the banks will not just let us get on with changing the world because a temporary majority in the House of Commons tells them to. They will fight us with ideas and with weapons. It was, after all, that organ of ruling class opinion, the Times, then edited by the shameless Rees Mogg, that welcomed the bloody overthrow of Salvador Allende and the Chilean government with the words:

The failure of the Presidency of Allende was also a tragedy for Chile herself, not because the coup put an end to a government which never had a majority either in the country or in congress, but because it marks the end of a long period during which Chile’s peaceful and democratic political traditions were the envy of her neighbours. To apportion blame for this is no easy matter. Many Chileans will argue that the Unidad Popular government had itself made the coup inevitable by its hopeless mismanagement of the economy leading to a breakdown in public order, and at the same time had provided justification for it by its own unconstitutional acts. On the whole this would be our judgement; there is a limit to the ruin a country can be expected to tolerate…
At this state what a foreign commentator can say is that, whether or not the armed forces were right to do what they have done, the circumstances were such that a reasonable man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene.

No doubt Rees Mogg had discussed just such ‘circumstances’ with ‘reasonable military men’ at Pirbright and Aldershot. (Pp. 94-5).

The last sentence presumably refers to the attempts various members of the elite, including the Times and the then editor of the Mirror, to organise a coup in Britain against Harold Wilson’s minority Labour government in 1975. If this had gone ahead, the result would have been the mass internment, not just of MPs, but also of other political activists and journalists. The proposed location for their imprisonment was either in the Shetland Isles or the Hebrides. Ken Livingstone discusses this in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, as does Francis Wheen in his book about 70’s paranoia, Strange Days. As for Pinochet’s coup, this resulted in the mass imprisonment, rape, torture and execution of 40,000-60,000 people. Parents imprisoned and murdered by the Fascists had their children taken away, to be raised instead by members of Pinochet’s Fascists, who were childless.

And Sparks is absolutely right when he states that those, whose power and social position is built on poverty and inequality will try to bring down those governments trying to end it. The Conservatives’ entire economic strategy, and that of the ruling elites they represent, is based on increasing poverty through austerity, welfare cuts, the privatisation of the NHS, and the creation of insecure, low paid work with little, if anything, in the way of workers’ rights like pensions or sick pay. And he’s also right about the way the same elite uses the press in this. We’ve seen the way the British press and media has consistently vilified Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as everything from Trotskyites and misogynists to anti-Semites, in order to prevent a genuinely reforming Labour government coming to power.

And the quotation from Rees-Mogg senior also shows how Jacob Rees-Mogg turned out the way he is. He’s the child of privilege, whose family owed its position to inherited wealth and inequality, and whose father dutifully supported the same establishment elite with his ideas and editorship of the Times. And Rees-Mogg senior’s approving comments about Pinochet’s coup also shows how easily other parts of the Tory party supported other Fascist thugs in Latin America. Like the Libertarian group, of which one Paul Staines, now Guido Fawkes, was a member, which invited the leader of one Central American death squad to be their guest of honour at their annual dinner.